Mother of 12, McKay taught family to serve

In a sense, Seattle's still benefiting from Kathleen Tierney McKay's parenting: She convinced her children that emptying the dishwasher was the first step toward serving a community, and raised them wanting to sneak glances at Newsweek in grade school so they could participate in adult dinner-table discussions.

A nurse married to a doctor in a household that took world affairs seriously, she raised 12 children, most now dedicated to public service in Seattle: dentists and business leaders, the head of a philanthropic foundation, and lawyers, two of whom went on to become U.S. attorneys.

And she did it by instilling in her kids the sense that helping out was a privilege.

Mrs. McKay — a mother and voracious reader who had a dinner table specially constructed so her family of 14 always ate together — died Saturday from complications associated with an old brain injury. She was 73.

Born in Missouri Valley, Iowa, in the early days of the Depression, she was the child of restaurant owners who gave away food to the destitute.

She skipped grades and was sent to boarding school for a more-rigorous education — a lonely affair that forever infused in her a desire to keep family close.

"She hated that they shipped her off," said daughter Joanne Fleming. "When her brothers and sisters all said goodbye to her on weekends, she'd get so choked up they always called it Blue Sunday."

She was so bright and fair-minded that in nursing school in the late 1940s, she was part of a group of volunteers who set out to make minority students feel welcome. She graduated at 19, but by then had found future husband John McKay, a Creighton University medical student from Seattle whom she'd met during an autopsy.

They settled on Capitol Hill in a neighborhood of large Catholic families, and she threw herself into the occupation she thought mattered most.

"She thought the most important job in the world was raising kids, and doing it right," said son Mike McKay, who served as the U.S. Attorney for Western Washington under the first President Bush. "And she was the best, most organized executive I've ever seen."

She delegated tasks to her children, from setting the table to cleaning up, but did so in such a way that the younger ones felt left out if they didn't participate.

"When you were 5, you got your first chore, but by that time it was like, 'How can I help out?' " Fleming said.

The family so wanted to please Mom that the kids were almost oddly well-behaved, with a baby-sitter once saying they were easier to manage than families with two children.

"I never understood how funny it must have looked to our guests," said son John McKay, the current U.S. Attorney for Western Washington. "With all those kids, you'd expect to see us swinging from the chandeliers, but instead we all had made-up jobs so every kid 'got' to do something."

Her children said Kathleen McKay never seemed to miss not actually working as a nurse, and had such a natural bedside manner that even their friends sought her out for talks and advice. Still, she found time to read the newspaper and U.S. News & World Report, keeping so abreast of current events that dinner time became an interfamilial debate.

"It was the most extraordinary thing," John McKay recalled. "Mom was a nurse and dad was a doctor, but we never talked about medicine — just what was going on in the world. We'd go around the table and everyone would get a chance to talk about whatever the topic was. If you were too young to understand, you could talk about something you'd read or were doing in school — never anything you'd seen on TV."

Like children who longed to move from the kids' table at Thanksgiving to where the adults were seated, it drove the kids to want to know about the world around them and defend their positions.

"By the time I got to law school, I already knew all about the Socratic method," John McKay said.

Kathleen McKay found time to work in Hospice, and took her children to serve food in soup kitchens, and later in life worked on a few political campaigns. In 1985, she was paralyzed during surgery, and spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair, but even then managed to find ways to lift up those around her.

"As an RN, she knew what was happening to her," Mike McKay said. "But she always handled it with such humility and grace."

Kathleen McKay was preceded in death by her husband, who died in 1989.

Besides daughter Fleming and sons John and Mike, she is survived by her daughters Mary Vial, Sheila Ryan and Tricia and Kathleen McKay, all of Seattle, and Julie McKay, of Pittsburgh; her sons Bill, Brian, Danny and Richard McKay, all of Seattle; brothers Bill Tierney, of Reno, and Gene Tierney, of Denver; sister Joan Tierney, of Missouri Valley; and 24 grandchildren.

Donations can be made to "Centennial Church Bell Fund," St. Joseph Church, 700 18th Ave. E., Seattle. The funeral Mass is scheduled for 1 p.m. today at the church.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com